The new film from popular Memphis roots rock band Lucero is not so much a music video as a mini-movie.

Taken from "Among the Ghosts," the band's recently released 11th album, the song "Long Way Back Home" has been expanded by acclaimed director Jeff Nichols — younger brother of Lucero frontman Ben Nichols — into a grit-and-grime saga of humid Southern dread, complete with cacophonous cicadas, handguns in glove compartments, pincer-fingered cigarette-smoking, rapper Al Kapone in a "Whoop That Trick!" T-shirt and a lead performance by moviedom's glowering master of menace, Michael Shannon, who has appeared in all five of Jeff Nichols' features.

As Ben Nichols' lyrics state: "In my hand I hold a pistol/ In my heart I hold the weight/ And it's a long way back home ..."

Shot in Memphis and the Nichols' brothers home state of Arkansas over a couple of days, just before the Fourth of July 4, the 7-minute-35-second video for the 4-minute-16-second song was released Tuesday, and already has accomplished the goal of bringing a good bit of media attention to Lucero's new album, the first for its own Liberty & Lament label. Such long-established entertainment-journalism outlets as Variety and such popular media websites as Vulture, Collider and IndieWire quickly posted notice of the video, motivated mainly by its re-teaming of Jeff Nichols and Shannon, who have become almost to the indie South what Scorsese and De Niro were to the Northeast.

Ben Nichols has contributed music to all his brother's films, from the low-budget "Shotgun Stories" in 2007 to 2016's Oscar-nominated true story of interracial marriage, "Loving," but "this is the first time we've worked kind of in the other direction, where his work is based on something that we've done," said Ben, 44. "We've been wanting to do something like this ever since Jeff was in film school, a long time ago," he added, referring to his brother's stint at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

Jeff Nichols could have shot a traditional music video, but he decided instead to create a more ambitious sort of mini-movie, recruiting not just Shannon and a name-actor supporting cast (Scoot McNairy of "Godless," Garrett Hedlund of "Mudbound"). Producer Sarah Green and cinematographer Adam Stone are longtime collaborators who have worked on such Nichols' features as "Mud" (2012), with Matthew McConaughey, the science-fiction chase film, "Midnight Special" (2016), and Shannon's tour de force, "Take Shelter" (2010).

In addition, all the Lucero band members appear, including Nichols, guitarist Brian Venable, bassist John C. Stubblefield, drummer Roy Berry and keyboardist Rick Steff.

The project's other producer was Memphis' Erin Freeman of Craig Brewer's BR2 Productions. Freeman recruited what she called a "full-fledged film crew," which included some 20 locals, and helped arrange the project's multiple locations, which included one of Ben Nichols' favorite hangouts, Alex's Tavern on Jackson.

Like the new album, the video was financed by the band; which this year marked its 20th anniversary. "It was a big investment by the band, but it was something all the band members were excited about," Ben Nichols said.

He said the video was shot in Memphis because "it was the place that made the most sense, because the band is here," but also because "Memphis was the place where we could call in the most favors." In any case, Jeff Nichols has been to Memphis many times, thanks to his Arkansas upbringing and because Jeff lives here, while Shannon became familiar with the city while researching his starring role as the King of Rock and Roll in the 2016 film, "Elvis & Nixon."

Although the production of the video represents a manifestation of brotherly loyalty and love, the content of the video is something else: The noirish story casts Shannon as a sort of prodigal brother, back in the Mid-South on the trail of the brothers who betrayed him. "Why would I want to kill my little brothers?" Shannon asks one lowlife, perhaps rhetorically. "Why does anybody do anything?" is the reply.